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This highlights one of the problems with pop culture and science. Pop culture has a tendency to fixate on a small number of big problems or sexy technologies t

• abakker 5y ago
  This is exactly right. Especially the part about how this phenomenon is not new. I seem to remember an article for grade school kids in a scholastic magazine from the late 90s that mentioned this. Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees. Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
  • brianwawok 5y ago
    No one likes their house burned down. I think building lots of houses in forests, is a similar problem as when people build lots of houses in flood plains. In both cases, we sneak in some houses during a "good" year, and then we get to spend all the future years trying to defeat nature.
    • bishoprook2 5y ago
      >I think building lots of houses in forests, is a similar problem as when people build lots of houses in flood plains. So is the Bay Area a good place to build houses? Santa Rosa, CA?
      • 34679 5y ago
        The cost for permission from Sonoma County to build a family home in Santa Rosa can approach $60k.
        • chokeartist 5y ago
          Which is an absolute rent-seeking shakedown.
        • bishoprook2 5y ago
          I was being facetious. The previous poster was comparing building California homes near trees to the folks who build on flood plains. A natural expansion of that tells you that you can't build in Santa Rosa (Tubbs Fire), Oakland hills (more fires), the Bay Area (earthquakes, someday the Hayward Fault will let loose), or really much of anywhere near the coast (rising sea levels, California Coastal Commission has decided that protecting your property with water barriers is no bueno).
          • lumost 5y ago
            The unfortunate reality is that some of this may be true. Building in danger zones where the home will need to be replaced in 10-20 years is an awful investment on a 30 year mortgage. If the property is untenable after 20 years then the owner is out a good chunk of money. This isn’t a big deal when property is cheap and can be paid off within 5-10 years, and rebuilt. But housing has become dramatically more expensive relative to cash flow than it has been historically.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  I first heard about the idea of letting some fires burn in The West Wing, which is „pop culture“ if anything is.
• btilly 5y ago
  I can only partially agree. Look at https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1298383464094265344/photo/1 https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1298383464094265344/phot... and see how big a chunk 2020 is of all megafires in California history. And 2021 is on track to be even worse. Past forestry management is why we have the the problem in the first place. Climate change is why the problem just got so much worse, so quickly. And is why we can't attempt to fix it as gradually as we created it in the first place. Both are actually important for understanding this subject. And climate change doesn't just come up because it is demanded by pop culture.
  • marcusverus 5y ago
    How does that data support the case that climate change is the main culprit? It shows no record fires from ‘77-‘03, and a lot of record fires since ‘03. Why wasn’t there a steady progression, if the cause is slow-and-steady climate change?
    • btilly 5y ago
      It is because natural variation (including a variety of multi-year cycles) far exceeds the long-term warming trend. So global warming shows up as an increased frequency of extreme events when natural variation and warming coincide. But variation is still dominant. However extreme events become more extreme. We are now seeing extreme events that simply would not have been possible without global warming. For example the 2011–2017 California drought was the most extreme drought in at least 1200 years. And yet, here we are again in what's shaping to be an even more extreme one. And going forward, droughts like this one are going to become common.
      • cratermoon 5y ago
        > extreme events become more extreme This is the beef* I had with Cliff Mass when he said the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest had nothing to do with climate change, it wasn't an extreme event, it was just natural variation. The temperatures may not have been more extreme than known outliers, but what he didn't say is much more important: How often would natural variations lead us to expect events like it and how long would they last? You can't just say "oh, this is just a typical thing that happens once in a hundred years" when it's happening every year. * I have lots of other beefs with Cliff, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.
• ip26 5y ago
  … create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse. I’ve concluded it’s actually more like NIMBY ism and willful ignorance. Nobody wants controlled burns in their backyard, and many don’t want to maintain defensible space. So everyone joins together to create this shared illusion that they can manage the land and their property however they want AND never suffer the consequences.
  • bullfightonmars 5y ago
    This is exactly it. Pop culture does not set policy. The current forestry management regieme around preventing forest fires was put in place to protect forests as an agricultural asset and resource for the timber industry. That practice has morphed into a protection of real estate as people have built their homes in the wildfire zone over the past 40 years. Prior to colonozation by Europeans in the Pacific Northwest, native americans regularly burned forests regularly. That practice stopped once their populations were decimated by disease and subjugation.
    • spfzero 5y ago
      It did not require native Americans, lighting could do it just fine. What was the thinking of these native Americans you speak of? Were they thinking "we should start wildfires because it will be better for the forest over a period of centuries"? Because...? I agree that the practice of trying to stop these fires results in larger fires later. What I'd like is more information on why native Americans were able to realize and act on this. I'm willing to believe it, but not without some explanation.
      • shawabawa3 5y ago
        There's a Wikipedia page on it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_...
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  Remember when the previous administration was ridiculed for suggesting the massive forest fires were largely caused by forest mismanagement and that artificially preventing burns would only make it worse? [0] Oddly enough, everyone laughed too when the same administration suggested the lab leak hypothesis... [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/14/trump-california-oregon-wildfires-result-forest-management/5791302002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/14/trum...
  • telchar 5y ago
    Credibility matters. Denying the big problem exists in spite of an overwhelming consensus results in being distrusted and ridiculed when (perhaps rightly) playing up a small problem over the big problem in a particular space. Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
    • 908B64B197 5y ago
      > Credibility matters People attack credibility when they can't refute the facts! > Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population. Of course, remember it was forbidden to mention the lab leak hypothesis on mainstream social media. They banned people for that.
  • tayo42 5y ago
    That's a disingenuous way to interpret this. nothing in that article is denying that forrest management is a problem. There's even a quote in there where Newsome acknowledged that is part of the problem. That admin wanted to do everything they could to down play climate change anyway they can. People were talking abuut forrest management before Trump said we need to rake our forrests in 2020 this was a big thing after the fires in 2017
• bsder 5y ago
  > The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. This is 100% true. Unfortunately, better forestry practices require a LOT more money to be pumped into the departments which manage those forests for manpower. Go take a look at how much manpower and resource it took to clean up even a tiny area around the Grand Canyon. In addition, climate change is making things like "controlled burns" increasingly dangerous. The number of days you have the conditions to do a controlled burn are getting fewer and fewer. "Better" forestry practices are not cheap, and nobody wants to spend the money until after their house burns down.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    agree and also over time, like lots of farming, ultimately control was more important that technique, so you get people who win at control, deciding the technique.
• hnick 5y ago
  I think it's also just modern internet reactive culture. I see it in other areas too. If I watch a video game review, sometimes the reviewer will spend a minute or more (in a <10 minute review) telling people this is just an opinion, reviews are subjective, this is just for me, maybe you will like it, it's OK to like things if I don't like them. It's really obnoxious, distracting, and even feels pandering sometimes. All these statements should be implicit, but here we are.
  • mannykannot 5y ago
    This sort of thing has been going on since well before the internet. J. K. Galbraith wrote about how, during McCarthy's red scare, one had to put all sorts of caveats in parenthetical phrases to break up anything that might be quoted out of context (it still would be, but one could at least point out the elided text.) This was hardly new then - see Cardinal Richelieu's well-known epigram "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." It is probably as old as language. If there is anything new here, the internet and talk radio has shown a lot of people how to do this. Some of them mistake it for wisdom, and others just like to annoy people who hold nuanced views. Don't blame the victims for the fact that it is no longer possible to assume anything reasonable is implicit.
    • hnick 5y ago
      It is old but I think the modern aspect is that is it much more of a 2-way communication medium. Yes, in previous eras you could get angry letters or phone calls. But today you can have hundreds of thousands of people respond directly on the channel that you are using to communicate. It makes it a lot harder to fire and forget with an opinion, so I don't blame them for including caveats, but it makes the content annoying. I am not annoyed at them personally for including these CYA spiels, I am annoyed that it has to be included.
      • mannykannot 5y ago
        You are right, and in particular, the quick-fire 2-way communication really ramps it up.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  One could also argue that the problem is people wanting to live in forests and not properly maintain treeline from recommended distances (~100ft) leads to so much residential damage. Stop living where there are forest fires and there won't be such an urgency to put them out. Also, I think there's a kneejerk reaction to blaming forest services for not taking care of the forests. When in reality (a) they do: brush clearing and controlled burns happen all the time in california & oregon, (b) forests are far too huge for even 10x the puny forestry service of today, and (c) budget is constantly being cut. Also x 2: the west coast US is experience drought unlike any since humans settled the west coast. Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely. EDIT: Regardless it is gonna happen, there are completely brown/orange forests in central oregon just waiting to burn.
  • Clewza313 5y ago
    > Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely. That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards. In Australia, there are trees like the aptly named stringybark that exude flammable oils and peel off thin strips of their own bark to form highly flammable piles of tinder under themselves, which appears to ensure that any forest fire is powerful but passes through quickly (not killing the tree), and conveniently eliminates any nearby competition in the process.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      I just backpacked through major burn zones from 2003 and 2020, and that is exactly how it worked. Mt Washington was burned to the ground in 2003 (B and B Complex fires), every single tree was burned down, even the big ones. The current new growth is about 5-10ft. In between Bend and Crescent there is a strip of forest that is completely orange because of the drought: top to bottom, every tree; it looks painted. The burn from last year near Lake Detroit has regions where no tree survived due to drought + fire. I recommend you backpack/drive/hike parts of Central Oregon to see the damage, and impending risk, for yourself.
    • 5y ago
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Pop culture spreads using the instruments of media (social or conventional). Presence of ubiquitious media in the age of the Internet and snatching everyone's attention - now we have a recipe for a total mob thinking. A giant hive of people (often passionate and angry) moving in unison for a singular ideology. We've created many of these mobs. Intellectual people are also losing their grip on truth. Before the internet, there was some damping factor in how information was distributed. This allowed for time and place for debate. How do we balance this? We desperately need instruments of truth without care for what the majority/minority believes, thinks, accepts, rejects or promotes. 100 years from now we're going to look back at this chaotic time in human history when we didn't know what to do with the Internet. For nature doesn't care about anything but the truth.
  • hnskrall 5y ago
    > For nature doesn't care about anything but the truth. A red pill awakening moment.
• ren_engineer 5y ago
  climate change is a get out of jail free card for politicians, not sure why people are surprised. Same thing happens with houses that flood because they were allowed to be built where they never should have been. Just blame climate change instead of government stupidity/corruption
• colechristensen 5y ago
  Here's the problem: People want to, but are very bad at caring about quality. For whatever subject, there will be a sort of platonic ideal -- and this ideal won't be the same for everyone as there is room for taste and priorities. BUT what that ideal actually is depends on a whole lot of subtlety and understanding... especially accounting for the marginally different outcomes for a different set of priorities which you get in diversity of cultures. Instead, you get extremism. There are a few people talking about real quality who are completely drowned out by people who generally know quite a bit less who want quality but don't understand it and opt instead for maximizing or minimizing some value. (i.e. the practice of preventing all forest fires, defund/abolish the police, prohibition, etc.) People can't handle subtlety or disagreeing with someone to a small degree. This is the trend, absolutism, not understanding details, and yelling loudly about everything. Try to get into a conversation about COVID-19 about actual risks and thresholds for certain actions and you'll either get complete deniers or advocates for every precaution (preferably forced on everyone at every level of possible control). How do you silence the loudest people on the extremes without simply being authoritarian?
• bishoprook2 5y ago
  >The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. Seriously, you should check out just how much of California used to burn in prehistory. I ran into a few papers on Sci-Hub about it. It's pretty crazy. It looks like a large part of California would be uninhabitable given natural practices.
• fladrif 5y ago
  In addition to the pop culture issue here, I think the other side of the issue is bike-shedding. In general I don't think people are all that knowledgeable in a very broad sense, so whenever they're approached by a topic they know one thing about, they'll talk about it as if it were the most important aspect; bike shedding.
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  The swipe about denial accusations was wholly unnecessary. Multiple factors are at play. They're feeding on each other. It's clear that there's a catastrophic problem that's developed, and continues to accellerate, with wildfire incidence and severity in North America. And that past forestry practices have all but certainly contributed. Starting over 20 years ago, the number and scale of fire scars I'd see whilst travelling through the Western US began impressing itself on me sharply. On one trip I'd headed out of Boise on state routes 21 and 75, through the Sawtooth Wilderness, and hit a fire scar that was over 20 miles long. I continued through to Yellowstone where the decade-plus scars of the 1988 conflagration there, one of the most severe in the US at the time, were still sharply visible, along with stands of unburnt, but clearly dead trees, on the mountainsides (beetle infestation I believe). There was still plenty of fuel. Other portions of that trip brought me through other fire scars, as well as terrain that would burn over the next several years (some of these immediately adjacent or twice-burned ground). One of my road stops ended up being a command-centre for firefighting efforts. That made news of the subsequent burns far more visceral. Some years later, I had a long road-trip talk with a retired US Forestry worker who gave the story of how mismanagement was fueling current burns --- this now nearly a decade and a half ago itself. I think about that conversation often. But wildfire is an increasing problem around the world, including in locations which have not to the best of my knowledge been subject to total fire suppression, including large regions of Siberia, ablaze now, burning for months, and quite possibly the continuation of what have become annual fires errupting for much of the past decade. The regions are simply too remote for the type of suppression the US and Canada have practiced. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/05/siberia-feels-the-brunt-of-climate-change-as-wildfires-rage-a74704 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/05/siberia-feels-the-... And much of the terrain I've seen burned isn't exactly "forest". It might have some trees, but is more scrubland. Whether or not that is also subject to overaccumulation of fuel load I'm not certain, but it's the type of terrain that would burn regardless ... and yet, still seems to be burning more frequently and more intensely than before. I've also driven through forests (part of the region now on fire in California, in 2015), and despite years of backpacking and rural trips, feeling very uncomfortable over just how painfully dry and primed for ignition that portion of the trip, made late in the year with hot dry weather and months of no precipitation, felt. The Camp Fire followed within a couple of years, and the Dixie fire is literally burning up the path I'd blazed. Forestry management is part of that, but bone-dry dust, pine needles, shrubs, and trees take more than just misguided foresters.
• hodgesrm 5y ago
  I'm interested in exploring alternative forms of forest management that can unwind the years of fire suppression and get to a new equilibrium that does not involve every forest being burned down along the way. Can anyone point to sources/research in this direction? It seems past time to look into more radical alternatives than just doing a few prescribed burns.
• dionidium 5y ago
  I don't locate the problem with "pop culture," but with a certain kind of activist culture that's currently popular. Activism isn't a truth-seeking operation. Activists already know the truth; their job as they see it is to educate or cudgel everyone else. Activism isn't responsive to new information, for this very reason. It isn't interested in hearing new truths. It already knows all the truths that matter and, further, perceives itself to be engaged in a battle to convert these truths into policy. I don't mean this to sound trite. I think it's a fundamentally mistaken way to operate in the world and it makes it a lot harder to have honest conversations about complex issues like this one.